The lucrative global business of taking advantage of lonely, gullible, and / or greedy Americans. MSNBC: ‘Nigerian scams’ keep evolving It bears repeating, but do not deal with anyone in or from Nigeria. Also, do not trust anyone you ‘meet’ on the Internet. When I worked at NCSoft, I used to discuss this with my coworkers, my contention being that online ‘relationships’ are inherently less real in some difficult to define way. Working at a video game company I was most certainly in the minority since most of the people I worked with had friends they spent time with only online. But I have seen it happen time after time, online friends betraying one another daily because of the ephemeral nature of online relationships. When I worked as a “Game Master” for Ultima Online I saw many cases where people would get scammed out of valuable items or entire accounts by people they thought of as close ‘friends’. People they ‘knew’ for months or years. This can happen in real life, too, but I would contend that real life presents greater obstacles to ill-doers in terms of detection and consequences. For one thing, in real life, it’s harder to pretend you’re of a different sex or age. Online you can be male, female, young, old, rich, poor, married, or single. Also, if you trick someone IRL (in real life, as we say) you are liable to get your butt kicked.
Monthly Archives: August 2005
01
Aug 05
Small World
Today I found out that one of the members of my club worked for the Austin Police Department as a psychologist until his retirement two years ago. I knew he was a psychologist by training, but I didn’t know anything more than that until today. After the meeting I told him my father worked for the APD in the late 70’s and early 80’s. He inquired after my dad’s name and it turns out he actually remembered him after twenty plus years. I told my dad about it later over AIM and he was pretty surprised. The world is a very small place.
01
Aug 05
Society and Psychopathy
Interesting discussion on the subject of psychopathy and the mind. Psychopathy as the “flipside” of anxiety:
James Blair: This is difficult to disentangle. We know that other pathologies – I mean, anxiety disorder for example, is associated with massively overactive amygdala activity, and if you treat anxiety disorder successfully, you’ll see a reduction in that amygdala activity. And in many respects, psychopathy is the flipside of anxiety disorder, and so potentially we’re imagining that there may be treatments that will allow us to boost that amygdala response, and so help these individuals out. But as regards whether it’s a fundamental problem caused by a specific set of genetic information, or whether it was caused by a particular environmental trauma, at a specific age; that question at the moment we just have no answer for.